The Cleansing

It was a very hot afternoon, some five years ago now, during a very dark chapter of my life, when I was struggling.

I had bottomed out in a very deep depression, and I was trying to feel alive . . . to feel any signs of life . . . to feel . . . something, anything but that empty, gaping, tattered, all-consuming hollowness where my heart should have been.

I had stopped off after work to pick up my son from the YMCA. His class was still in session, so I stood outside in the heat of the day, waiting for him, sweating.

I wondered if I would ever find my way back to myself, and any semblance of a "normal" life again.

The humidity was oppressive, but looking back on things, I was actually rather enjoying the opportunity to do nothing, having to be nowhere, not having to think about something, and simply observe people as they came and went.

They dropped off and picked up kids, parked their cars and walked inside in their spandex workout gear and cross-trainer shoes, hurrying from their air-conditioned cars through the heat, into the cool of the building.

All had places and lives they had left behind for a short time to exercise, and would then return to the timeline of their lives afterward.

From my vantage point, leaning against the corner of the building, I could see the entrance and entire front of the building, the parking lot and out to the main road beyond, lined with tall trees.

Sweat dampened my face and hair as I watched the tops of the trees across the faraway main road begin to sway slightly at first, then under a bit more force.

A few moments later I heard a breeze and finally felt a blast of cooler air as it rushed at me from the tree line.

Then the initial burst of air became a wall of wind blasting across the parking lot, blowing dust, pollen and leaves toward me.

I squinted a bit.

The flag which had been hanging lazily snapped out perpendicular to the pole, straining against the cable, flapping furiously in the strong wind. It felt ominous, like something big was about to happen.

Then I heard something. A roar that seemed to come from beyond the trees, and growing louder. As I watched, the flailing trees were overtaken by the sound and immediately became obscured, in what an artist would call a grey wash, their colors dulled.

I stared across the parking lot, my shirt flapping wildly, and hair lifting . . . squinting, watching the line made on the ground and in the air itself by this wall of grey moving across the parking lot toward me.

The wind blew crazily in my face now, howling like a beast, as it swept over the cars and the building, racing toward me . . . the noise was almost deafening now.

I stood transfixed, determined to merely experience the simplistic majesty of this moment, as the grey wash and the roar closed the gap between itself and me, finally sweeping over me in a blast of stinging raindrops and cool air, immediately soaking me to the skin.

I closed my eyes, allowing the rain and wind to blast at me. I drank in all my senses would allow. I raised my arms out to my sides, turned my face up toward the sky, closing my eyes to be completely in the moment of the experience of this naturally-occurring baptism, this cleansing.

I felt the energy of nature rushing all around me, bathing me, enveloping me . . . the sky was crying for me with such fury, a fury which, until that point, I had only known of my own tears.

I had been the recipient of a wonderful gift by the higher power . . . a natural wiping of the slate, a rebirth of sorts.

It was an amazing event that I will never forget.